Conscious.

This will be rambling, and probably incoherent. I've just submitted my final essay of the year and I've been up for ages, just came back from badminton where I failed big time, and my back feels ravaged! Life is no go? But in the wee hours of the morning, while I was barely started on my essay, some thoughts occurred to me.

These thoughts I will attempt to pin down and articulate. A caveat, this might be honest. Another disclaimer here, however, is that not all of these thoughts will belong to me. By this I mean that sometimes you have thoughts, or certain things spring up in your mind unbidden, but it does not necessarily mean that they are yours. Not if you do not own them. Possibly this means you have to actively disown them. Reject them. We cannot have control over what our brain chooses to throw up, but we do over what we each privately decide to claim. I am not sure I am able to better explain this, not today I guess. Perhaps an example. Perhaps a pretty girl walks by, or you come across certain pictures or scenes in books or movies, and sometimes certain vile thoughts appear. That's not you, that's your body, hormones, your sex drive, whatever. You are what you choose to be (I might not actually believe in that 100% but in this case the phrase works) so you're not determined by what you think, but what you choose to think. What you choose to believe, maybe that's a better term.

So in the morning, with an essay deadline looming uncomfortably close, and a remarkable lack of desire to complete it, I started wondering about the futility of it all. These are not uncommon thoughts, I've had them before and I'm sure most people do, at some point of time in their lives. Sometimes it's after heartbreak, after devastating failure, but rarely is it because of an impending essay I reckon. And yet I wasn't contemplating just the futility of education, but everything else beyond that, everything else it promises too. The degree, the job, the salary. The wife, the family, the end. All of our futures lie still ahead of us, and yet what is it we are supposed to want, what is it we are supposed to derive out of it? Why the stable career, why the metal rice bowl, why the 5 figure salary? Why the stable marriage, why the happy family, why the inspiring legacy left behind? Is it happiness? Days upon days, years upon years of mindless, numbing 8-5s in exchange for what? Happiness over the weekends? During the annual getaways to Europe? How is that in any way worth our whiles? What for stability if we have nothing worth building? What for a peaceful, "meaningful" existence (in the way the world asks of us) paying our taxes and contributing to the economy, if we reach the finish line spent, finding out we have just spent our entire lives working for the sake of working, earning money for the sake of money, never questioning that surely there must be something else out there? We all emerge, some as champions, from the race, but we surely are as much a rat at the end as we were at the beginning. In the realization that we have just spent our entire, beguiling future (or so they tell us), working for our future. There's nothing at the end.

Look at us preen, an endless parade where we offer ourselves to the world, where the world seems to offer itself to us. An endless procession of loves and loss and friends and goodbyes, anger and disappointment and resentment and regret. A constant charade where you show at all times your best face to the world, no matter how it spits in it, where the only time you can afford to let your guard down is in the shelter of your own home, or your own bed, your own pillow, where you sleep the damp sleep of the damned. Or you drink yourself into oblivion night after night, knowing only at night the futility of it all, too wasted the following days to act upon what you know to be true. Where we hide behind labels or we profess not to care, call me a hopeless romantic if you must, I can't stand the mainstream, I'm an old soul like that, because that explains all our lives, and if it explains us then it also absolves us, cause that's just the way I am, and I can't be held responsible for my actions cause I'm hard-wired just like that. Where we are too afraid to expose any, all of our scars to the world which has inflicted them upon us. Where we are cut up and broken inside but no one ever will know, and if I pretend nothing is wrong with me then you are obliged to pretend that too. Where any real emotions and gestures can only survive behind a facade of knowing irony, this post-modern romance. Where we hide behind cliches and self-deprecating smiles, so that we have something to fall back on in case our genuine feelings get rebuffed. Cause if you knew it, then you never really meant it did you?

Where the children in us are buried beneath our workloads, cause of course they lied when they said 8-5, Monday to Fridays. Where our capacity to rejoice in the beauty of life is so diminished by the stark images we see on the news, where our laughter resounds only in the halls of cinemas, followed only by silent dour walks back home. Where we seek out beauty only to capture it, only to reassure ourselves cause each like we receive is an affirmation of our existence. I am seen, and therefore I am.

This charade, this parade, this competition, this endless grind,  the petty quarrels, our petty existences. How could it possibly be worth it? Recycling through our lungs all this secondhand air, recycling the ideas of thinkers long gone, what can we do that is of any worth at all? Does it not sometimes seem as if our continued existence only serves to further degrade and corrupt all that there is around us? With words we tear down what (who) should be built up, we are petty and destructive in all our little ways thinking that of course this doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things I am a good person after all, but little things add up and we are not alone we have enlisted our friends and their friends and we are the angry mob. We are the agents of entropy infecting everything around us with the chaos in our lives as we crash and we slash and we hurt and we blurt, all those words that we never should that we swore we never would. Is this not human nature? we ask.

Why do we continue crawling inch by inch, day by day? We do what is expected of us we work or we study we diligently do our readings submit our essays meet new people stay pleasant trade niceties but do we know why?

This week we celebrate Easter, which is the most important event in the Christian calendar. This is in the most fundamental sense of great relevance to the stream of consciousness as I have attempted to put in words above. At the heart of the message of Easter lies redemption. Redemption from our sins, from our human nature. And victory over death.

This means that I am able to start off from a position of victory, and I believe it's always important to know where you are if you are to have even a clue of where you will be going. Do I have all my answers yet? No, I don't. But I know that it is out there. It is of course different for everyone, which sounds like a truism but probably holds true nonetheless.

Answer is probably the wrong word for me to be using here, because life isn't neat like that. Or is it? I guess for me now it actually is. The answer itself is, achieving it... My Bible tells me, seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. And so I have no need to worry. I don't have to, but I do nonetheless. I'm still working it out spiritually.

So I live for God, which is a pretty neat summation, but this fact carries with it its many appendices if you will. This comprises many, if not all, of the answers to those questions. The better word would probably be reason here. Reasons to live, reasons for our continued existence.

There are the big, obvious ones, like love. We live because we love, and we live that we might love. How many accounts have we read and witnessed of the transformative power of love? Colours are brighter. Days past and seasons fade away. Some people even change.

Hope. Everybody hopes. How else can anyone deal with life, pull through times of sorrow and grief, or even times of indifference, times where it seems your life is never going anywhere? Let's be honest, who would do anything without some sort of potential payoff? This is not limited to financial gains (oh man I kind of feel like I'm typing an actual essay here,) just the potential of something, anything better.

And then there are the small things. In fact I would say these are, if not more important, at least more in our control than the big ones. Sunsets. Coastlines. Views from a mountaintop. Snow. Rain. The soft breeze. A good book, movie, song. A certain turn of phrase. A picture. Good food, even. The things that flavour life, that make every day so inimitable and tomorrows irresistible. Beauty. The small things in life. A message from a friend. Gifts. A simple dinner with family, friends. A play. Meaningful conversations. Knowing that someone cares for and about you. Things you can't expect of each day, but which invariably brighten those days in which they are found. Or observed, if we would only see. Open our eyes open our minds open our hearts. Life is out there but it is also here, it is coming but it is also now. Life is in the here and now.

I would go on but I have to sleep to catch a train tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm going to start on some hardcore living. Distilled life, if you will. I will travel.

Happy easter folks!